Books in ReviewSelling God

Hustling the Religious Product

Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. By
R. Laurence Moore. Oxford University Press. 317 pp.
$25.

Reviewed by Mark A. Noll

In holy writ, the conjunctions between authentic faith and the worlds of
commerce are strangely varied: the Hebrew Scriptures contain much in the
Pentateuch on the protection and use of property, but a different realm
of existence is central to the prophets: "Ho, every one who thirsts,
come to the waters, and he who has no money, come, buy, and eat! Come,
buy wine and milk without money and without price." (Isaiah 55:1) In the
words of Jesus, nothing could be stated more definitely than that "a
man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Luke
12:15) Yet from the selfsame authority we hear that the End of the Age
can be compared to a man who chastises a servant for not putting "my
money with the bankers" so that he could have "received what was my own
with interest." (Matthew 25:27)

These biblical words do not directly answer modern questions about how
to organize economies, nor do they provide the believer with easy
guidelines to the practical conundrums thrown up for faith and morals by
the need to live in a modern economic world. They do, however, show that
biblical writers regarded economic and spiritual analysis as
overlapping, and yet distinct, modes of reasoning.

R. Laurence Moore's Selling God is an extended historical
meditation on religious experience in the United States, where, from the
start, the two spheres of reasoning "religious and commercial" have
occupied almost identical territory. The larger canvass of the book is
Protestantism, which from its sixteenth-century beginnings Moore regards
as "an exercise in efficiency and bureaucratic streamlining that
appealed to Europe's commercial bourgeoisie." But the specific focus is
the manifold ways in which the story of religion in the United States
may be written as a story of "commodification." Moore, a veteran
interpreter of American religion who teaches history at Cornell, states
his thesis at the start or close of almost every chapter: secularization
in America has never meant a zero-sum struggle in which the "world" and
the "church" battle to control the same bit of turf. Rather,
secularization has always been a much more nuanced reality, with the
gains and losses for religion attending the same set of circumstances.
It is "religion's systematic and expansive complicity in mechanisms of
market exchange" that provides Moore his argument and dictates the
arrangement of his evidence.

This study is quite a bit more subtle than other recent books that have
also featured the market orientation of American religion like Roger
Finke and Rodney Stark's The Churching of America, 1776-1990,
which celebrates the struggle of denominations for "market share"; or
Michael Scott Horton's Made in America: The Shaping of Modern
American Evangelicalism, a bracing jeremiad bemoaning exactly what
Moore describes. The subtlety in Moore's book comes from the recognition
that in the United States, it could not have been any other way. A free
society, which prohibits a state church and discourages most kinds of
governmental assistance to religion and a society, moreover, which, at
least after the 1790s, organized itself in accordance with the reasoning
of free markets is a society where, as Moore puts it, "Either religion
keeps up with other cultural aspects of national life, including the
commercial forms, or it has no importance." The citizens of the United
States "remained a religious people because religious leaders, and
sometimes their opponents, found ways to make religion competitive with
other cultural products." Put in these terms, the process Moore
describes has an air of inevitability about it and so deserves to be
explored before it is celebrated or condemned.

The fact that Moore himself admits to a "secular" standpoint actually
helps to clarify his interpretations. Moore does comment more
extensively on how commodification affects the ability to apprehend
transcendence than his purportedly secular standpoint would lead readers
to expect. But for the most part, he succeeds in treating the subject in
terms of historical forces instead of divine reality a strategy that,
ironically, only sharpens the impact of his book on those who do
believe.

If Moore comes close to overkill in repeating his thesis, his evidence
is strikingly diverse. The book's first five chapters treat ways that
nineteenth-century Protestants (with a concentration on circumstances
before the Civil War) carried out the commodification of faith. The last
four treat twentieth-century matters and expand coverage to Jews and
Catholics, while also noting the very different forms of Protestantism
that have emerged in this century. Throughout, Moore readily
acknowledges the insights of earlier scholars on the particular topics
he treats; his contribution is not so much fresh research as large-scale
synthesis of individual themes that the burgeoning scholarship on
American religious history has made available for such a purpose.

For the nineteenth-century United States, Moore argues his thesis by
examining salient examples of religious-market interaction. He begins
with activistic Protestants, led by the American Bible Society and the
American Tract Society, who exploited new capacities for popular print
to reach the country's rapidly expanding audience of readers. He then
describes the way that urban revivalists adopted theatrical methods for
their own tasks even as they combatted the evils of the stage. Moore
shows how the Protestant mobilization for evangelism and reform provided
models for the organization of America's first political parties and
then outlines ways in which political salesmanship may have doubled back
to influence the churches. He reviews the tangled story of why
Protestants first resisted the exploitation of leisure but then became
earnest advocates in market competition for leisure time. This section
closes by examining the way that Protestant leaders self-consciously
used religious controversy to "sell" their distinct beliefs and also to
distribute books and periodicals, market their meetings, finance their
church buildings, and meet budgets.

Moore's case studies provide intriguing vignettes: from the instincts of
Washington biographer Mason Weems, who was almost as capable a salesman
for the idea of lively, dramatic, popular literature as he was a seller
of such works himself; through the reluctant accommodation of
evangelical Protestants to the idea that fiction and the visual arts
could be enlisted for religious purposes; to the way in which republican
civic humanism worked to inspire audience-oriented market thinking for
both Protestant reform societies and the great political parties of the
antebellum period. But his overarching conclusion is more important:
even to have a chance at preserving a substantial place for religion in
American society at a time when most European nations were witnessing
steady decline in religious adherence, the question was not whether
Americans would market their faith but how.

The arguments of the second half of the book may not be quite as
compelling, since (as Moore recognizes) immigration, splits within
denominations, and adaptability to modern realities have led to a
tremendous diversity in religion throughout the United States. Still, by
focusing on mainstream liberal Protestants identified with the Federal
and National Councils of Churches, the Protestant evangelicals who have
most aggressively exploited the popular media, and those Catholics and
Jews who have participated most visibly in popular culture, Moore
sustains his argument down to the present.

For the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he shows how the
Chautauqua movement brought together into a seamless whole an unlikely
combination of traditional Protestant uplift and equally traditional
Protestant suspicion of organized holidays. As a counterpart Moore
suggests that working Americans, especially the growing numbers of Roman
Catholics, made their own adaptations of religion to laborers' needs in
ways that were neither as orderly as contemporary religious leaders
hoped nor as filled with bad faith as later Marxist interpreters
contended.

The book closes with strong chapters examining full-scale liberal
Protestant commitment to the big-time advertising of the 1920s and the
similarly unreserved exploitation of television and radio by
evangelicals in the last half century. In these chapters, Moore is very
hard on the liberal Protestants, especially for their painstaking
efforts to remove the inconveniences of faith. In this context, Moore
summarizes Reinhold Niebuhr's complaint about Protestant liberalism:
"The problem was that they had exchanged the emotional fervor of
Christianity, its deep and moving feeling for the terrible burden of
human depravity, for a breezy faith in efficiency." And he says of
efforts by the Federal and National Councils of Churches to retain free
air time by accommodating to the wishes of the networks and the Federal
Communications Commission: "The effort not to antagonize an audience
(listeners after all only had to turn the dial) seemed a strange
extrapolation from the life of a crucified Christ." For some reason,
Moore expresses warmer feelings toward the evangelical entrepreneurs of
radio and television who, in their own way, have out-liberaled the
liberals in orienting their message to what could pay.

In a revealing epilogue, Moore tries to take the sting out of a book
that could be read as a massive indictment of the churches. What we have
seen in the United States is new, Moore argues, only as it represents a
new way of brokering the accommodations that have always occurred
between church and world. "Although the nature of organized religion's
"secularity has changed in the past two hundred years," he says, "that .
. . is not by itself a reason for scandalized outcry." "The particular
form of worldliness that churches in the United States have exhibited by
entering the marketplace of culture has only displaced earlier forms of
church worldliness: direct political involvement in the domestic and
foreign policy of states, conspicuous displays of non-bourgeois pomp and
wealth, and heavy investment in the higher forms of philosophical and
scientific knowledge."

But despite a great capacity to treat such matters analytically, and
with much deference to the ongoing spiritual mission of religious
groups, Moore cannot hide his alarm as the book draws to a close. He
asks where religious bodies will obtain "transformative power" where
they will find "the paradigm-busters" and "the real religious prophets"
if the churches are so thoroughly integrated into the system that the
effort to market consumes their whole vision.

This provocative book raises, but does not itself answer, several
vitally important questions. First, it draws attention to the more
general worldwide context in which religious bodies now struggle to
exist. That context may be put in the form of a conundrum: from the
experience of the last two centuries it would seem to be the case that
for churches to engage without reserve in the world of laissez faire
markets is to lose their souls (mostly the experience of the liberal
West); on the other hand, for societies to seek an alternative to
laissez faire economic organization is to destroy bodies along with
souls, for churches and individuals alike (mostly the experience of the
communist East and the tribal South). For churches in the West, the
spiritual lesson of Selling God would seem to be that there is
no point in opting out of the market relationships that define such a
vast proportion of western life. At the same time, opting in must be
regarded as a dangerous matter where the stakes, as stated long ago, are
ultimate: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
(Matthew 5:21)

A second effect of Moore's book is to raise curiosity about other ways
of organizing religion that have embodied alternatives to the
commodification of faith. Historically, these alternatives have included
primarily varieties of established religion and of radical sectarianism.
Neither of these alternatives is flourishing today. The Roman Catholic
Church is the prime instance of a body that once insisted upon the
principle of establishment, but now increasingly acknowledges the
importance of freedom in the choice and expression of religion.
Sectarianism (at least of the sort that abandons market concerns) also
seems like an increasingly difficult road to pursue in a world so
insistently networked as the globe has become at the end of the
twentieth century. Yet it may be that seasonings of an establishment
mind, or hints of sectarian subversion, may still retain some potency
and, if pursued by religions in the marketplace, may enable believers to
sell their wares with more integrity than otherwise might be the
case.

Finally, almost despite himself, Moore pushes believers to a fresh
evaluation of the "product." In the end, if what churches, synagogues,
mosques, and other religious organizations have may be
marketed, then there is no purpose in wringing one's hands if it
is marketed. But there is every need to see clearly what is
going on, and to strive valiantly against simply equating the marketable
with the real. One of Moore's most provocative assertions heightens the
issue: "Religion in the marketplace of culture has become an
ordinary commodity. It might seem a high-class product or a
low-class product, just like automobiles and cheeses. Jim Bakker is
Velveeta; Norman Vincent Peale is sliced Swiss in plastic wrap; Reinhold
Niebuhr is Brie. Without an official role to play, religion's power lies
in what can be claimed through advertising. Conservative evangelicals
and liberal Protestants are essentially doing the same thing. Imitation
breeds imitation, and so it will go into the future." In these terms,
everything hinges on the implications of the word "ordinary."

Mark A. Noll is Professor of History at Wheaton College and author of
A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada
(Eerdmans).